“I'm Hard to Catch”

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 603-627
Author(s):  
Freda L. Fair
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Color Theory ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Black Sexuality ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Visual Cultural Studies ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
A Site

Abstract This article examines Living with Pride: Ruth C. Ellis @ 100 (1999) by Yvonne Welbon, an independent documentary film centered on the life of African American lesbian centenarian Ruth Ellis to advance a queer of color theory of longevity. The analysis closely considers Ruth Ellis's assertion in the film that she: “. . . wasn't in—What you call it? . . . Closet. Never.” Although Ellis explicitly disavows “the closet” declaring instead that she was never in it, both in the film and commonly she is often referred to as “out.” The article addresses the ways in which “out,” along with Ellis's declarations of “never” and “wasn't in,” examined together as “never in,” render Ellis's living legible within black sexuality studies and LGBTQ cultural politics. Ellis advises at the end of the film that cultivating “atmosphere” interpersonally in daily life engenders longevity. Living with Pride puts forth a model of longevity that is personally and collectively grounded in black sexual difference and queer of color resistant social practices that trouble public health life expectancy discourses. Drawing on queer of color critique, black sexuality studies, and visual cultural studies, the article engages Ellis's formulation of black queer atmosphere as a site of imagining that advances the livability of racialized sexual difference.

Thinking with Trans Now

Social Text ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 125-147
Author(s):  
Aren Z. Aizura ◽  
Marquis Bey ◽  
Toby Beauchamp ◽  
Treva Ellison ◽  
Jules Gill-Peterson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
The World ◽  
A Site

This roundtable considers trans theory’s status as a site of thinking racialization, empire, political economy, and materiality in the current historical, institutional, and political moment. We ask, what does it mean to think trans in a time of crisis?, and what is the place of critique in a crisis?, acknowledging that global crises are not insulated from trans, and trans is not insulated from the world. This roundtable looks to materialist formations to think trans now, including a new materialism premised on thinking about trans embodiment outside of trans as subject position, the materialism of objects and commodities, and a historical materialism shaped by queer of color critique.

Race and Sexuality

Sociology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghassan Moussawi ◽  
Vrushali Patil
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Race And Sexuality

Pioneering work on the relationship between race and sexuality can be dated from the late 1970s. Early academic, political, and artistic work by women of color in particular gave voice to women’s simultaneous experiences of heterosexism, racism, sexism, and so on. Queer of color work broadly theorized the role of race and racism in knowledge, politics, and concepts of sexualities. Historical work on empire, slavery, and colonialism further demonstrated this fact, while contemporarily focused transnational work does the same for early-21st-century processes. Given the importance of intersectional and transnational analysis, research on race and sexuality has become a growing and central feature of sexuality studies. Such research does not treat “whiteness” as a taken-for-granted category of analysis, but instead unpacks how sex, sexuality, and race are always co-constituted. With emerging theoretical lenses such as Queer of Color Critique, the study of racialized sexualities has become crucial to any exploration of sexuality. In addition, studies of race and sexuality look at how they have historically informed and continue to inform one another, in ways that include thinking about empire, Racisms, carcerality, surveillance, criminology, deviance, desire, and changing understanding of the erotic. Both intersectional and transnational work consider multiple racial formations and take into account the multiple genealogies of sexuality studies, centralizing work that is informed by women of color feminisms, transnational feminisms, queer theory, and black feminist thought. To best understand racial and sexual formations, race and sexuality studies allow us to think of the two as always informing one another. Thus it shifts our attention from primarily thinking about stable identity categories and culture to centralizing people’s relations to power.

Questioning a Single Narrative: Multiple Identities Shaping Black Queer and Transgender Student Retention

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael D. Coleman ◽  
Jason K. Wallace ◽  
Darris R. Means
Keyword(s):  
College Student ◽  
Student Retention ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
College Student Retention ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Black Racial Identity ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Transgender Students ◽  
Black Queer

Researchers explore factors that influence retention and persistence of queer and transgender students and examine retention and persistence among Black students. However, there is a dearth of retention and persistence scholarship centering the nuanced experiences of Black queer and transgender college students at the intersections of their gender, racial, and sexual identities. Using the queer of color critique conceptual framework and an anti-Black racism lens, the authors present a systematic literature review to illuminate opportunities for scholars to (a) disrupt singular narratives that erase queer and transgender experiences from Black student retention discourses and (b) address the ways scholars erase Black racial identity from broader queer and transgender student retention research. Centering the case of Joshua, a Black queer cisgender male-identified college student, the authors highlight research, practice, and policy implications that consider social class, institutional type, multilevel intervention strategies, and intersectionality in Black queer and transgender college student retention discourse.

scholarly journals “In the Name of Love”

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-158
Author(s):  
Matty Hemming
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gay Male ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
The Erotic

This essay explores Black queer feminist readings of the sexual politics of James Baldwin’s Another Country. Recent work at the intersection of queer of color critique and Black feminism allows us to newly appreciate Baldwin’s prescient theorization of the workings of racialized and gendered power within the erotic. Previous interpretations of Another Country have focused on what is perceived as a liberal idealization of white gay male intimacy. I argue that this approach requires a selective reading of the novel that occludes its more complex portrayal of a web of racially fraught, power-stricken, and often violent sexual relationships. When we de-prioritize white gay male eroticism and pursue analyses of a broader range of erotic scenes, a different vision of Baldwin’s sexual imaginary emerges. I argue that far from idealizing, Another Country presents sex within a racist, homophobic, and sexist world to be a messy terrain of pleasure, pain, and political urgency. An unsettling vision, to be sure, but one that, if we as readers are to seek more equitable erotic imaginaries, must be reckoned with.

Queering Protest

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-189
Author(s):  
Jodi Rios
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Black Life ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

This chapter uses a framework of queer theory to argue that the particular aesthetic and affect of resistance in North St. Louis County made visible the extreme violence of the state in addition to exposing the inherent contradictions within masculine and heteronormative spaces of Black struggle. This is a critical component of queer of color critique. Similar to an Afro-pessimistic perspective of blackness, which locates Black life as a site of ontological death, the chapter argues that “the problem posed by blackness” is an antagonism rooted in the historically naturalized logics of society, including physical space, and is not a conflict that can be rectified through legal means. Through a more optimistic lens, it also highlights the various ways Black women and gender nonconforming individuals practiced a choreopolitics—of bodies in space—that demanded the terms of visibility be set by those “in view.” This particular practice of visibility and an insistence on simply living as an act of protest illustrate the capacity and power that Black lives and life hold in revealing the truth and thus reconfiguring the metrics of living as fully human.

Who is (Not) Protected by Title IX? A Critical Review of 45 Years of Research

2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Elizabeth J. Meyer ◽  
Mary Quantz
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Title Ix ◽  
Sex Discrimination ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Scholarly Publications ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Transgender Students ◽  
K 12

Background/Context This is the first published systematic literature review with an exclusive focus on Title IX scholarship. This article aims to offer a holistic view of the existing knowledge base in this field presented in peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Purpose This review of the literature identifies key trends in this body of research and highlights strengths, as well as gaps and oversights, that future research should address. Research Design This descriptive literature review systematically collected 169 peer-reviewed articles to identify the conceptual boundaries of the field and the current gaps. Data Collection and Analysis Authors applied Booth, Sutton, and Papaioannou's SALSA approach (Search, AppraisaL, Synthesis, and Analysis) to this systematic review to identify and analyze the 169 articles included in the study. We applied an intersectional feminist lens and Queer of Color critique to the analysis of the included articles. Findings/Results Peer-reviewed scholarly publications on Title IX (169) have generally focused on analyses of legal decisions (93) and studies of athletics (75), with little attention to other aspects of the law. Most studies lacked intersectional analyses of how “sex discrimination” has been understood in K–12 and higher education contexts, which leaves experiences of students of color, transgender students, and LGBQ students missing from most of the scholarship in this field. Conclusions/Recommendations This review of the literature is intended to help scholars interested in issues of sex discrimination and gender equity in educational institutions in the United States have a clear overview of scholarship that already exists related to Title IX in order to ask more focused and critical questions about its impacts and implementation. More research is needed to understand the ways in which educational institutions interpret and apply their responsibilities under this law—particularly through the lenses of intersectional feminism and Queer of Color critique. Contemporary issues, including campus sexual assault, and the negative experiences documented about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students in schools underline the importance of staying current with Title IX, and the current body of literature indicates scant attention to collecting and analyzing data about this law's application in practice and implications for diverse groups of people.

Poetic Operations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
micha cárdenas
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
Decolonial Theory ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
Algorithmic Analysis ◽  
And Gender

In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano's holographic art, Esdras Parra's and Kai Cheng Thom's poetry, Mattie Brice's digital games, Janelle Monáe's music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.

Alternatives to Coming Out Discourses

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuzhen Huang
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer People ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Queer Of Color

The discourse of coming out has historically served as an effective vehicle to build and sustain the LGBTQ movement in the United States. It has also been utilized as an empowering resource that enables queer people to establish a queer identity organized around self-awareness and self-expression. However, queer of color critique and transnational queer theory argue that the prevalent discourse of coming out is built on a particular kind of queer experience and geography, which is usually from the standpoint of White, middle-class men of urban U.S. citizenship and is rarely derived from the experience of queer people of color and non-Western queer subjects. Taking an intersectional perspective, Snorton interrogates the racialization of the closet and proposes a sexual politics of ignorance—opposed to the disclosure imperative in coming out discourse—as a tactic of ungovernability. Centering the experience of Russian American immigrants who are queer-identified, Fisher proposes a fluid and productive relationship between the “closeted” and the “out” sexuality that resists any fixed categorization. Focusing on the masking tactic deployed by local queer activists, Martin theorizes the model of xianshen, a local identity politics in Taiwan that questions the very conditions of visibility in dominant coming out discourse. As a decolonial response to the transnational circulation of coming out discourse, Chou delineates a “coming home” approach that emphasizes familial piety and harmony by reining in and concealing queer desires. Being cautious against the nationalist impulse in Chou’s works, Huang and Brouwer propose a “coming with” model to capture the struggles among Chinese queers to disidentify with the family institution. These alternative paradigms serve as epistemic tools that aim to revise understanding of queer resistance and queer relationality and help people to go beyond the imagination of coming out for a livable queer future.

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